SEMANTICS Yusuf Al Arief, M.

Hum
AN INTRODUCTION
WHAT IS SEMANTICS?
The study of meaning is called semantics.
Semantics is usually concerned with the analysis of
the meaning of words, phrases, or sentences (see
connotation, denotation, lexical field, semantic
feature) and sometimes with the meaning of
utterances in discourse (see discourse analysis) or
the meaning of a whole text.
Semantics comes from the ancient Greek word
semantikos, an adjective meaning ‘relating to
signs’, based on the noun sēmeion ‘sign’. In
Ancient Greek, one of the original uses of
sēmeion was as a medical term for the
symptoms that were the signs of underlying
diseases.
WHAT IS MEANING?
(in linguistics) what a language expresses
about the world we live in or any possible or
imaginary world.
English uses the verb to mean to refer to a
relationship involving at least one of three
different types of thing: language, the world
(including people, objects, and everything
outside of ourselves) and our own minds or
intentions.
Here are five typical examples of mean in
English which exemplify some of these
relationships:
1. When I said ‘Dublin has lots of attractions’ I
meant Dublin, Ireland, not Dublin, Virginia.
2. In Sydney, ‘the bridge’ means the Harbour
Bridge.
3. ‘Stout’ means ‘short and fat’.
4. By turning off the music I didn’t mean that
you should go.
5. Trees mean water
INITIAL CONCEPTS
1. Lexeme
2. Sense/referent/denotation /connotation
3. Compositionality
LEXEME
also lexical item
the smallest unit in the meaning system of a language that can be
distinguished from other similar units. A lexeme is an abstract unit.
For example, in English, all inflected forms such as give, gives, given, giving,
gave would belong to the one lexeme give.
Similarly, such expressions as bury the hatchet, hammer and tongs, give up,
and white paper (in the sense of a government document) would each be
considered a single lexeme. In a dictionary, each lexeme merits a separate
entry or sub-entry.
SENSE
The place which a word or phrase (a lexeme)
holds in the system of relationships with other
words in the vocabulary of a language.
For example,
the English words bachelor and married have the
sense relationship of
bachelor = never married.
REFERENCE AND REFERENT
Reference is the relationship between a word
or phrase and a specific object.
For example:
The word tree refers to the object ‘tree’ (the
referent).
DENOTATION
that part of the meaning of a word or phrase
that relates it to phenomena in the real world
or in a fictional or possible world.
For example, the denotation of the English
word bird is a two-legged, winged, egg-
laying, warm-blooded creature with a beak.
CONNOTATION
Connotation names those aspects of meaning
which do not affect a word’s sense, reference or
denotation, but which have to do with secondary
factors such as its emotional force, its level of
formality, its character as a euphemism, etc.
‘Police officer’ and ‘cop’, for example, have very
different connotations, but similar denotations
COMPOSITIONALITY
The possibility that the meanings of sentences
are made up, or composed, of the meanings of
their constituent lexemes.
It is important to note that not all combinations
of words are necessarily compositional.
One especially important category of non-
compositional phrase is idioms.
LEVEL OF MEANING
The distinction between word meaning and
sentence meaning, then, defines a basic
contrast between lexical and phrasal
semantics.
Another important contrast is the one between
sentence meaning as just described and
utterance meaning.